The Joy of Talking Dumb Shit with Smart People
On academic cynicism
I had a deadline this past weekend, which meant that my writing time was pretty well spoken for all last week (that, plus being a bit worn out from spending the previous weekend in Cooperstown where The Pip’s travel baseball team was playing in a tournament). Thus the silence here; I barely even read anything on Substack last week, forget about writing anything new…
Toward the end of the week, as the oncoming train at the end of the tunnel drew near, I did catch up a tiny bit, though, which included one of those collisions between two pieces that are actually speaking to the same thing, though they seem very different on the surface. The specific theme here is a kind of cynicism about what academia is, versus what it’s imagined to be.
I think it was posted later (I don’t care enough to check), but the one where the cynicism is most blatant is Jeff Maurer’s Holy Moly Do We Ever Over-Value College. This spins off an ad for a MA program at Grand Canyon U, but includes some great “I bet that was cathartic” ranting:
That’s not at all what happens. In reality, almost nobody flunks out of an elite college; the graduation rate at Ivy League schools is 96 percent. And if you’re thinking: “That’s because they’re so selective,” well, sure…that’s part of the story. But I’ve known morons who went to Ivies. Also, for comparison: 27 percent of first round picks in the Major League Baseball draft never make it to the big leagues, and those kids are subjected to scouting, physicals, and statistical analysis a billion times more rigorous than the sorta-bullshit evaluative measures that get you into a top school. Being a preternatural genius will earn you an Ivy League degree, but so will being a half-engaged warm body whose tuition checks clear.
True intelligence is not required for a college degree. Nor should it be: Intelligence would frankly be way too much to ask of people in their late teens/early 20s. Their brains are not fully developed, and they contain nothing but video game cheat codes and steps to Tik Tok dances anyway. That’s probably why colleges basically just require students to make a good faith effort to appear to be making a good faith effort. If you’re assigned a 20-page essay, then you need to turn in 20 pages of English-language words — the only real rule is that you can’t just type “zmixclk ijfs sjfksj uidjdnjjh”. If the thinking behind the essay has the intellectual heft of “zmixclk ijfs sjfksj uidjdnjjh”, that’s fine; just please appear to be doing work that’s not total garbage. Which is a skill you'll need in the workforce, anyway.
There’s a bit of truth to this, though as a comedy writer by profession, Maurer’s obviously playing it up a bit. As someone who’s spent the last thirty-mumble years embedded in elite higher education at one level or another, I can’t really dispute the claim about failure rates— it just about requires a concerted effort to get an “F” grade at a lot of highly-rated schools.
At the same time, though, I can’t think of many people I’ve encountered in these contexts who I would say were actively dumb. I could give you a lot of examples of people exercising incredibly poor judgement, at a level where I might mutter “What a moron…” while watching them, but even the folks I knew who were squeaking through with minimal effort were pretty sharp and capable when they chose to be. The number of rich halfwits getting waved through because their family name graces some buildings is genuinely pretty tiny. Certainly much smaller than you’d think from a lot of the #discourse around higher education.
If I’m being completely honest and consistent, of course, the “not dumb, just incredibly poor judgement” cohort would include a number of very successful tenured faculty along with the rich students. Which sort of leads into the other piece that Maurer’s collided with, which isn’t directly cynical but a very earnest response to somebody else’s cynicism. Timothy Burke’s “Academia: The Absence of Intelligent People Talking Intelligently” offers a whole slew of plausible explanations for a cynical comment in a profile of Samuel Delany:
Anyway, at one point, the article turns to Delany’s academic career from his first appointment at the University of Buffalo through to his time at Temple University, which spurred his engagements with literary theory and sharpened his pedagogy around creative writing. However, Delany also says that he found academic life boring: “‘I thought the university was a place where a lot of intelligent people spent a lot of time talking intelligently,’ he told me, but colleagues seemed uninterested in discussing ideas outside the classroom. He preferred Manhattan, where neighborhood book sellers were always available for an intellectual quickie.”
Delany is beloved in the more capital-L Literary corners of the SF community, but also a bit prone to saying things that make me roll my eyes a bit, so this isn’t exactly surprising. As with Maurer’s cynical take, though, it’s not entirely wrong— my conversations with faculty colleagues outside a direct work context are mostly not about Big Ideas, but mostly banal stuff about kids and sports and domestic life. It’s not unreasonable to ask why that might be, and Burke does an extremely thorough job of it, listing 20 potential explanations.
Personally, I would give the most weight to his #12:
Everybody would love to have great intellectual conversations but we’re just too tired because we already have those conversations in other venues—in our classes with our students, in our disciplines and in our scholarly writing. There just isn’t enough cognitive bandwidth for more of it. Sure feels like this sometimes.
This has the very great virtue of also explaining Delany’s experience with booksellers in Manhattan. That is, if you’re spending your days teaching literary theory to undergrads, your evenings grading their attempts at it, and your summers trying to generate your own, having yet another conversation about Ideas seems a lot like work, and you might well want a break. If your daily grind consists of managing orders and inventory and balancing the books and ringing out people who just want a paperback copy of the latest bestseller to leave behind at the end of their beach vacation, though, having Chip Delany wander in to talk about SF as Literature is a pleasant diversion.
It’s also worth looking a little at numbers 17 and 18 on Burke’s list, though again I’d put a slightly different spin on them:
It’s precisely because some faculty treat intellectual conversation as a playful exercise that real intellectual conversations are rare. ‘The point is not to interpret the world, it is to change it’: good intellectual conversations have real stakes and are about doing real things in the world and faculty don’t have the courage, mostly. Another common sentiment, both within the academy and outside of it—that conversation for conversation’s sake is a dilettantish, foppish luxury and it’s only worth getting into a discussion if it will have instrumentally tangible outcomes.
This absolutely describes a particular brand of crashing bore common in academic circles, though I would broaden the criteria very slightly, because the worst offenders in the category tend not to be all that focused on anything that might actually lead to an implementable change in anything. The real essential characteristic, to my mind, is that they define “Real Intellectual Conversation” extremely narrowly, excluding everything but their particular obsession of the moment. The exact topic is prone to changing from one year to the next, but there’s always a particular Issue that they focus on, and any conversation that can’t be dragged back to that is deemed frivolous.
Next up, we have:
It’s not our job to have intelligent conversations all the time, our job is to teach and to produce knowledge. The people who expected this of academic life are naive romantics who need to grow up. There’s something to this—the expectation that professors are wise people who sit around with each other being wise is maybe in the same boat as “Literary critics should just love literature, why don’t they” and “Historians should just remove bias from historical records and provide an objective account of what really happened!” and so on.
This is, to some extent, the flip side of the previous, but I would be somewhat inclined to put a more positive spin on the whole thing, in a way that sort of ties together all three of the explanations I quoted. That is, I think that to a large degree the problem here is a tendency to overvalue a particular brand of ostentatiously Serious conversation and to undervalue discussing dumb shit with smart people.
I’m maybe best known among the faculty and staff at Union as “The Non-Student Happy Hour Guy,” because during the year I “organize” a weekly gathering at a local pub. (Scare quotes because my work here consists of sending approximately one email per week reminding people that it’s a thing that happens.) These are a highlight of my week because it’s a chance to get together with a bunch of my smart and interesting colleagues in an informal setting.
Every once in a while, we get sucked into Serious conversations about the politics of higher education generally (as opposed to just local gossip) or the relative merits of different political systems or bits of technology. Most of the time, though, we’re just talking about dumb shit— kids, sports, travel, the weather, movies, music, tv shows… the usual stuff. These are a great boost to my mental health, though, precisely because they’re frivolous conversations with smart people— there’s a set of references and a level of analysis that comes up in these settings that I really don’t get anywhere else in an active way (I listen to some podcasts that have a similar vibe, but that’s not remotely the same). It’s very restorative, and almost always sends me into the weekend in a much better mood.
As the holder of a Ph.D. in (a subfield of) physics, I am contractually obligated to work in a Feynman story here, specifically the thing with the plate. (Here’s a version with allll the math if you want.) There are, of course, important caveats about his self-mythologization to put with this, but I think it resonates with a lot of physicists for a good reason: it illustrates that there can be real value to applying serious analysis to dumb shit. He credits this for snapping him out of a funk, and I think a lot of us have had that kind of experience—being in a place where the thought of doing Actual Work is actively unpleasant, but thinking seriously about some dopey side problem is fun and restorative. And occasionally leads to useful insights that bring you back around to real work.
I think there’s a sense in which this kind of thing is the actual secret sauce of elite higher education (which kind of comes back to Maurer’s thing). The real benefits of college come less from learning and applying particular skills in a formal classroom setting than from just being around other smart and interesting people more or less all the time. People promoting liberal arts education talk a lot about flexibility in thinking that comes from studying many subjects and that sort of thing, but I often suspect that where that really gets developed is in just hanging around with peers bullshitting about pop culture and the like. It’s when you’re bringing a bit of serious analysis to bear on dumb movies or ephemeral pop songs that you really internalize the practices of being smart (for lack of a better word). And it’s as that becomes a reflex that you really develop the ability to analyze anything, which is the ultimate hallmark of a successful education.
That’s maybe a little noodley and self-indulgent, but it’s kind of restorative to write in that mode, so it’s all good. If you like this kind of thing, here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
I was just thinking about “the thing with the plate” recently as a tangential matter to all the Oppenheimer stuff and never realized that it was addressed in AJP. Thanks for the link! I’m sure I have that very issue on my “yellow shelf”. :)
More and more I am coming to think the academic/educational/ideal value we are pursuing via college comes not so much from talking about "ideas" but from talking about "experience" with the same analytical bent usually reserved for "ideas." Relating our experiences to each other and cultivating an understanding of how other perspectives operate in reality expands our own ability to relate to and utilize our own experiences.